American Creation, by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf). Gives the founders their full due but insists that they made serious mistakes. - Jonathan YardleyDry Manhattan, by Michael A. Lerner (Harvard). Exceptionally interesting. Lerner accurately observes that Prohibition was the most ambitious attempt to legislate morality and personal behavior in the history of the modern United States. - JYLegacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday). He paints a devastating portrait of the CIA as an agency run, during the height of its power, by Ivy League incompetents. Must reading. - David WiseMedical Apartheid, by Harriet A. Washington (Doubleday). The Tuskegee Syphilis Study remains an ignominious milestone in the intertwined histories of race and medical science in U.S. society. A courageous and poignant book. - Alondra NelsonMongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds, by Gregory Rodriguez (Pantheon). A fascinating excursion through the history of Mexican immigrants in the United States. - Pamela ConstableThe Most Noble Adventure, by Greg Behrman (Free). Meticulously researched. Behrman vividly describes many of the larger-than-life individuals who converged to design and execute the Marshall Plan. - Moises NaimNixon and Mao, by Margaret MacMillan (RH). MacMillan, who has availed herself of some valuable new interviews, narrates the history beautifully. - Orville SchellParis, by Andrew Hussey (Bloomsbury). A breathless race across more than 2,000 years of massacres, revolutions, insurrections, riots, wars, beheadings, plagues and poverty. The rat's-eye view. - Molly MooreThe Road to Disunion, by William W. Freehling (Oxford). The second and concluding volume of Freehling's splendid, painstaking account of the setting of the stage for the Civil War. - Jon MeachamSacco & Vanzetti, by Bruce Watson (Viking). The literature of the case is vast, but surprisingly little of it provides as balanced and unemotional a survey as this volume does. - JYUnruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Hill & Wang). This lively, provocative book disputes the idea that the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to protect civil liberties. They wanted, he says, to make the United States more attractive to investors. - Pauline MaierWest from Appomattox, by Heather Cox Richardson (Yale). Argues that the years after the Civil War saw nothing less than the reconstruction of America, a recasting of the relationship between the government and the people. Engaging and reveals much that is fresh. - Edward L. AyersWhat Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford). The period between the end of the War of 1812 and the Mexican American War in 1848 is one of the most important in American history. Howe brings an impressive array of strengths to the daunting task of encapsulating these decades in a single volume. - JY